What a horrible argument. So if I am the dictator of a country who has 99% of the world's wealth, and I spend 2% of that on the military, it's ok? I'm not a threat to the countries that spend 90% of their .000001% of the world's wealth?

Whatever percent you're spending is completely irrelevant to how much you're actually spending. This reeks of straw man.

And "paranoid war-mongering" is a state of mind rather than a state of finances. The fact that in pure amounts of money, the US spends enormous amounts is crucial in itself, but the "paranoid war-mongering" part is definitely not disproved by percentages of income or people - the US leadership promulgates fear on an on-going basis, and the US citizens are afraid and demanding to be "kept safe". It's a well-known tactic employed by tyrants of every stripe, including the Nazis at one point; make people afraid and xenophobic, then call them unpatriotic if they so much as question going to war at the drop of a hat and you can lead a population about by the nose... even make them feel good about it.

That's exactly what I was thinking. $1 is still $1 whether you have $4 dollars in your other pocket or $400,000. The fact of the matter is that we spend FAR FAR FAR more than we actually need to on defense.

I just... half of our defense budget could wipe out Africa's debt... It's not right to let things continue this way...

Whenever I travel, and I'm in uniform, I always get thanked, for "fulfilling national interests" or what have you. I'm going to tell people if they are grateful, they need to get involved, and make sure things change.

It's a racket. Too many people make a lot of money off war. That's why you had the 'cold war'. When that was over they needed a new enemy to justify outrageous 'defense' budgets. So they invented an enemy that you cannot even see. This is perfect because nobody knows when or if the invisible enemy can be beaten. After all, they are hiding in hi tech caves in the mountains of Afghanistan. What a load of bollocks. And people believe it.

As a non-American, I'm glad that America does spend on military. Imagine America didn't have the largest army in the world. Then countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea would all of a sudden be a whole lot scarier.

US armed forces, particularly the Navy, definitely have a dampening effect on the aggression of other countries. It's not uncommon to park a carrier group near a potential conflict to encourage things to proceed peacefully.

If you're talking about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, then yes, they got an epic pass under the radar in terms of spending, as well as contracts that are tied into the wars given to various corporations (Haliburton, Blackwater, etc.).

If you manage to find real accurate numbers, you've just entered the cheat codes for the white house.

There's nothing paranoid about it. It's all well calculated. They are bleeding the American taxpayer dry to fill their own coffers. This has nothing to do with real or perceived threats to national security.

If you agree with this hypothesis, then you must agree with the hypothesis that simply building military equipment and paying soldiers to stand around and do nothing would grow the economy equally well. Handing out cash directly to the American people would be even better. Using the money to invest in education, health care, and infrastructure would be superior to that.

Of course, good luck convincing a conservative to walk that logical path.

I agree to this. At least here in the American Mid-West, people would rather set their money on fire than contribute towards public services. They scream about increasing taxes, then wonder why the roads are falling into disrepair and the school districts fire hundreds of teachers.

Proportionment should not count (or should not factor 1-to-1) - just because you have more money in the bank than everyone else in the neighborhood you should keep 12 AK-47s in each room, private tanks in your home ???

I agree it shouldn't probably factor 1-to-1, but if you have more stuff, it's more expensive to protect it, in terms of money and manpower. If you're the richest house in the neighborhood, then it's probably a rational action to set up a robust security system or otherwise take care of your property. When you extend it out to nations, the social contract basically demands such behavior.

I agree the US engages in more adventurism than I'd like to see, but the truth probably lies somewhere between the unadjusted graph and the 1-to-1 illustration.

It's about risk. In a neighborhood (an imperfect analogy, I admit), if everyone knows that one house has the flatscreen TV and expensive sports car, then it's a more likely target for robberies. Mongolia's pretty big, but I bet their defense budget is pretty cheap, in part because very few powerful nations/terrorist groups/whatever view them as an attractive target.

I do see your point, however, I think a small distinction should be made. Regardless of whether you are a bigger target or not, the fact remains your house can only be robbed by a robber who is as equally or better equipped than your security system. I.E. no matter how attractive a target we are, Mongolia will never be able to rob our house. They don't have the technology or the budget to do so. So, If you know that your security system is 9 TIMES better than every other robber, then it stands to reason you could safety cut your security system bill in half and still not be robbed. Wow, that's really convoluted, but hopefully it still makes sense.

Yep, I think you're right, and we certainly could stand to cut a substantial portion of our military without harming our national security. I do think the original article has a point though, that just comparing raw dollar amounts can be misleading.

I think a better analogy is income tax. A good portion of modern military activity is peace keeping. So it makes sense for the haves to help pay to secure life for the have nots. Granted the Iraq fiasco flies in the face of that but I regard that as a Bush anomaly.

As an aside I'm wondering what some of these other nations pay their troops. If you spend less of you're GDP on the military but have a greater proportion of troops per capita, how does that affect soldier pay? A significant portion of the US military budget is pay.

Hang on. The data is far from decisive. Just because the article strives to make the point by putting our military spending into a context that balances it against our budget or population size doesn't mean that the notion of the US as a warmongering nation is untrue (it doesn't mean the opposite is true either). Rather than try to marginalize someone who wants to point out some facts that go beyond the data in the article, why not engage the argument in an honest, meaningful way?

I think the article provides an interesting perspective. I don't think you can possibly say the data is conclusive--esp. in that it takes such a calculated view of the data.

If you read carefully, you may notice that both Israel and Jordan get high marks for spending. Where do you think the lion's share of their military funding comes from? In Jordan's case, the article's author makes it patently clear that we fund their military spending, in part, so we can then lean on them to put peace keeping forces into places where US forces would be disruptive.

Georgia was another one, right? From an article on america.gov:

"The Georgia Sustainment and Stability Operations Program (GSSOP), estimated at $190 million, began in 2004 to train battalion-size units in light infantry tactics, engineering, logistics and command-and-control operations for service with coalition forces in Iraq, according to the U.S. Defense Department."

Seriously, the whole "baby-killer" thing is inflammatory. I know. Still the whole neat-and-tidy war concept is a carefully constructed fiction, and the fact that babies and other civilian deaths occur in a war should never be left out of the equation.

I'm sorry, how does comparing a country's military spending to its GDP makes sense? Military spending as a fraction of GDP would only be a meaningful statistics if rich countries somehow had more need to wage war, which is, at best, poor logic and, at worst, completely unsound.

And taking that fraction as an indication of "warmongering" is just stupid. So if a nation achieved good economic progress in a unit of time, and managed to double its GDP without changing military, it's now half as much of a warmonger? And a nation experiencing economic decline also automatically becomes more warmongering as their GDP is falling?

I don't have a problem with U.S. defense spending, I have a problem with the lack of education and healthcare spending. A more educated and intellectual population wouldn't allow the rise of numb skulls like Sarah Palin and those Teabagger mouthbreathers who are intent on dragging the U.S. into the dark ages.